Now that the dust has settled on most major publications’ Best Albums of 2025 lists, it’s finally time to unleash the most objectively correct and most well-written of them all: Warm Visions’ Top 50 Albums of 2025. I’ll reserve my thoughts for music in 2025 as a whole for my retrospective post that goes up early in the new year, but looking below, you’ll find some excellent records, some which make the future seem incredibly bright, and others that make the past look that much better than the cursed timeline we continue lengthening.
As always, you’ll find a Warm Visions description for the record, a little blurb written by yours truly, a Bandcamp streaming link, and click any of the album artworks to be brought to the respective artists’ Bandcamp page so you can buy the album there. That’s the least I can ask of ya!
HONORABLE MENTIONS::
- AGRICULTURE – The Spiritual Sound [The Flenser]
- ANATOLE MUSTER – hopecore [Self-Released]
- BLOOD ORANGE – Essex Honey [RCA]
- JUST MUSTARD – WE WERE JUST HERE [Partisan]
- KEIYAA – hooke’s law [XL]
- MASON LINDAHL – Joshua / Same Day Walking [Mt. Brings Death]
- MIFFLE – Goodbye, World! [Self-Released]
- RESAVOIR & MATT GOLD – Horizon [International Anthem]
- TAPEWORMS – Grand Voyage [P-VINE]
- TORTOISE – Touch [International Anthem]
- U.E. – Hometown Girl [28912]
50. CHAOS IN THE CBD
A Deeper Life [In Dust We Trust]
Hi-fi CD sound systems flank a lush dancefloor, a skylight photosynthesizing oversized plants below. A well-dressed legion of dancers boogie with delicious fragrances populating the space.
—
Two English dudes bring us into a realm in which nothing bad happened in the 90s and we all got really nice stereo systems and large-potted leafy plants tastefully placed in each corner. A sublime melange of smooth jazz, lite disco, old school house and R&B melts together into a bougie, well-fragranced early evening.
49. FACS
Wish Defense [Trouble In Mind]
Disassembling a building by only the screws and nails, letting the building collapse itself under the stress of its own joints and the weight of its materials.
—
Blistering noise rock from the uber-consistent Chicago trio, who have been a frequent favorite of mine nearly every year since 2019. Wish Defense brings more of what the band is good at: poison-tipped vocals, acidic guitars and punishing percussion. The reason why this record beats out other records who carry similar characteristics? It just FEELS different, what can I say. Also two facts I pieced together after writing this: this was the final album produced by Steve Albini, and it’s one of the final records that came out on well-loved record label Trouble In Mind. A true era-ender.
48. ANNAHSTASIA
Tether [drink sum wtr]
Waking up to find your partner staring at you, the sun slanting in through the windows such that you can’t tell if the sun is setting or rising. A candle is freshly blown out.
—
Annahstasia brings one of, if not the most arresting voice to the list, helping her stake a claim of having one of the most impressive debut records of 2025. With a huge register, a deep vibrato and an emotional delivery, the LA singer/songwriter billows with promise, this album surely going to become one that will gain many more fans as time passes.
47. SML
How You Been [International Anthem]
A trio of giants scheme on how best to fit themselves through a small doorway without breaking it, utilizing advanced math and physics in their pursuit.
—
Culled from various live performances, Los Angeles supergroup of mercenary studio players SML lock together like a kaiju-slaying mega robot on a variety of freaky, off-kilter tracks. Theres little coherence across songs but when it hits it’s critical, with dizzying grooves emerging from the most unlikely of configurations.
46. SAM PREKOP
Open Close [Thrill Jockey]
A swarm of krill undulates on and around your body, picking off any dry skin until you’re assimilated into the ocean floor.
—
Sweet modular synthesizer patches and rhythms and bleeps bloops blops morphing into micro-symphonies of pure melody, a delightful carbonated beverage that lifts you into the cloud dimension. Who knew that The Sea and Cake frontman could also write satisfying melodies for one of the most satisfying instruments.
45. CROSS RECORD
Crush Me [Ba Da Bing!]
The faceprint of someone who recently died appears in a local park’s fresh soil after the first spring rain, their face appears later that same day in a cloud formation.
—
Cross Record’s first album since 2019 sizzles, squelches, gasps and sighs underneath the pressure. It’s a messy, personality-infused record that balances pulverizing heaviness with delicate wisps, thousands of candles faintly lighting the remains of a plane crash. Music for storm clouds, last shards of sunset, and hearing ocean waves from the road.
44. AUTOMATIC
Is It Now? [Stones Throw]
Riding your air boat through the flooded, irradiated streets of a major US city, feeling the uncomfortably warm night air pound at your pores, clogged with copper-scented dust.
—
The shift has begun to take place. In the 2000s and 2010s, the call to come to the cities within indie rock was immense. Come and join a scene, explore your dreams. Midway through the 2020s and dreams have more or less collapsed. Cities are factories of pollution, environmental, sonic and psychic damage induced, and placated by jingling keys like micro-pleasure sources. Automatic, a trio from LA, has long painted life as being eternally sucked dry from mosquito-like corporate overlords through dry, mechanical post-punk grooves and acid-bathed production. Is It Now? is their best and most concise album yet, cranking the bleakness and groove knobs concurrently.
43. COLE PULICE
Land’s End Eternal [Leaving]
The first wildflower blooms in an explosion-decimated version of the Earth.
—
The virtuosic saxophonist channels two types of worlds on their beautiful new record: one that exists not just as the Earth we live on, but one that attempts to map the entire cloud of cosmos that surrounds us. These moments don’t just feel large, but transcendental, with long, unbroken runs of saxophone backed by choirs of angelic voices and trembling guitar. The other world slithers within the moments that humans rarely witness, or are as fleeting as they are desired, or as Pulice says “In a Hidden Nook Between Worlds.” That’s music for the fleeting moments before a sunrise, where our reality feels its most paper-thin. Flickering instrumentation rises into a shadow-casting bonfire, warming our souls against the icy rain of our current world.
42. SCREE
August [Ruination]
Spending a summer and winter working as concierge at an old world luxury hotel, serving some of the most eclectic and worldly individuals in the world, listening to their stories.
—
The NYC trio Scree made one of my favorite albums in 2023, Jasmine on a Night In July, and have followed it up with a more active / reactive record, August, that’s splashed with enhanced instrumentation and an added sense of gravity. Or perhaps it’s just a heavier weight bearing down on the melodies and mood of the record as a whole, as more “rock” elements pop into the traditional “lounge-type” instrumentation and melodic compositions. Arabic coffee shop music teleported into lounges of the Midwest, with saffron-touched tango bleeding into a country bar where a slide guitarist practices his best, saddest song.
41. TAN COLOGNE
Unknown Beyond [Labrador]
A room thick with hundreds of hanging curtains obscures the furniture and the room’s occupants within. You must uncover whose voice is calling you.
—
A totally overlooked dream pop from New Mexico, Tan Cologne spins gauzy guitar textures soaked in the pre-requisite levels of reverb, and silvery vocals that shine like a beam through fog. Plenty of Cocteaus worship on here (complimentary, there can never be enough of that, unless they’re trying too hard, in which case this does not), and applies a general sense of casual malaise that’s easy to appreciate in these deflated times.
40. DERADOORIAN
Ready For Heaven [Fire]
A real school for scholars of the dark arts, alchemy, magic and general psychic behavior is tucked away in an impenetrable thicket of thorns. They practice cultures from around the world from times before time was cataloged.
—
For some reason, I always envision Angel Deradoorian’s music being made and performed in some tall, ancient tower on a cliffside. Deradoorian is in the center of its highest room, toiling at a cauldron with a horde of minion goblins passing her ingredients for her spells, and doing geometric dances alongside the bubbling grooves that escape via gas bubbles from the boiling stew of magicks. Not sure how Angel would feel about that imaging, but her music feels steeped in ancient, psychedelic traditions, with certain chords tweaked melodically in such a way to make it feel medieval in a way. Bare-bones, psychedelic dance punk and art rock with plenty of charm and shagginess. And along with that maybe a goblin that was known to be a part of Meredith Monk’s dance ensemble back in the day is just kinda vibing in the background while Angel does her thing.
39. DOMENIQUE DUMONT
Deux paradis [Antinote]
Finding a VHS tape at a thrift store that poses as a tourist information & advertisement video for some tropical island you’d never heard of before, until you watch it and realize it’s voyeur videos of you on said island: laying on the beach, eating meals and going on walks in paradise.
—
Estonian dream pop duo Domenique Dumont has been a mainstay on Warm Visions since their 2015 debut EP, and ten years later they’re still making blissful, psychedelic island pop that connects with me in a great way. Deux paradis is a slinky, dubby record that delights in the sunlight it can capture, but also thrives in the darkness, blossoming like nightshade surrounded by twinkling fireflies. It’s about as humid and balmy as you can get from a country bordering the Baltic.
38. MALIBU
Vanities [Year0001]
A layer of soft powder snow has accumulated upon your sleeping body as you drift further away from a dimming city skyline on an ice floe.
—
French producer and composer Malibu finally treats us to her debut full-length album, plush with the sweeping monoliths of sound she’s known for. Like laying at the bottom of the ocean, watching the stormy currents from below in the muted darkness.
37. CHAT PILE & HAYDEN PEDIGO
In The Earth Again [Computer Students]
Nuclear-dusted winds howl around and through blasted-out buildings in our abandoned cityscapes.
—
Doomsday goes down in Oklahoma City. OKC sludge metal band Chat Pile taps new OKC resident and guitar virtuoso Hayden Pedigo for an unlikely collaboration that sees the two entities gracefully navigate the end of the world. Gorgeous finger-picked guitar is juxtaposed against crushing guitars and Chat Pile’s paranoia-melted vocal shrieking. It’s a record that oddly radiates a lot of tranquility in between the blown out chemical bombs Chat Pile’s performances allude to.
36. DANIEL BACHMAN
Moving Through Light [Self-Released]
A trail cam picks up an eldritch being sauntering through a secluded patch of woods, shifting time and space around it and glitching the camera feed.
—
This is folk music for 2025. Virginia artist Daniel Bachman continues his streak of pushing the genre forward with excellent records, as Moving Through Light is one of his more experimental and electronics-heavy records in a minute. At the base of it is his guitar playing, which is digitally stretched and misconfigured into ugly, rotting shapes. Like the world around us, it comes apart at the seams but chugs along regardless, powered by humanity at its core.
35. BARKER
Stochastic Drift [Smalltown Supersound]
The process of deleting your scanned-in digital replica of yourself off of the cybernetic ngo database so they can finally stop endlessly creating clones of you.
—
Unhurried to make you have a wow moment, Barker’s lush techno and electronica focuses on deepening the mood the German producer and DJ wants to set across the record. Sure there are moments of high-energy breaks and meltdowns, but Stochastic Drift is deliberate at building the elements of the song before giving you the satisfaction. Those lead-up moments are still fantastic, with some of the best sound design I’ve heard all year.
34. TOPS
Bury The Key [Ghostly International]
A beleaguered night shift worker encounters every one of their ex lovers on their way home, turning into a high speed race away from each one of them at sunrise.
—
You can’t have a Warm Visions list without a TOPS record if they put one out that year. One of my favorite pop groups of the last damn near 15 years (!), the quartet crafts some of their most rhythmically-complicated songs of their career on Bury The Key, and get straight up rockin’ with it on others. There are also some of the best songs of their whole catalog, with jammers like “Call You Back” and “Chlorine” featuring the now-iconic guitar timbre of David Carriere and feathery falsetto of Jane Penny. Still full of drama, full of glamor. It rocks.
33. SWORD II
Electric Hour [section1]
A group of graduating high school seniors set things in motion to protect the younger classes from the clutches of an evil corporation that moved into town a few years back, seeping wretched oils into the consciousnesses of the townsfolk.
—
Atlanta trio take on the discordant, sleep-deprived dream pop sound of modern contemporaries like Spirit of the Beehive, but layer in some of the most hooky, satisfying melodies on any indie rock record from this year. Many moments on this record make you think “I’ve surely heard this before, but can’t quite place it.” Well, you’ll be thinking of Sword II in those moments now – the others clearly aren’t as sticky as they are.
32. SALAMI ROSE JOE LOUIS
Lorings [Brainfeeder]
An experimental drug to help with drowsiness allows you to hold regular conversations with others, and participate in basic activities while letting your brain engage in REM sleep. What results is unintelligible exchanges and bizarre hallucinations that leave lasting ripples in your consciousness.
—
Anxious, knotty and murmuring, the latest Salami Rose Joe Louis album is not as ambitious as her last two, both of which embarked on cosmic concepts and brain-melting performances, making for heady, lengthy listening experiences. Lorings is a more shimmering, serene listen (not to say boring, but more dreamy and ambient in execution), with misty keyboards twinkling in a fine dust. It’s an album that turns in on itself constantly, with Salami second-guessing herself, feigning happiness and being forced to forge new mental pathways in the face of mental distress. It’s a murky journey finding a new way forward, a vulnerable record that shines with beauty beneath. See song of the year candidate “A pool to cry in” and tell me the beauty isn’t there, shrouded behind a wall of fog.
31. SMERZ
Big city life [Escho]
This night has to last all your life.
—
While not the abrasive, obtuse Smerz I loved in the late 2010s, the Norwegian duo remain as steely as ever on their breakout album, Big city life. Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt are still ice queens, singing in an intimidating flat affect amongst minimal, soft club instrumentals that make it feel like life is all one, continuous night, and that you better party before the sun comes up.
30. PURITY RING
Purity Ring [The Fellowship]
Two lovers meet in their favorite multiplayer online game to execute a ritual that would make them lovers in real life. They plug various cables into their flesh, letting their blood mingle with their advanced computer builds.
—
An album that feels like a home for individuals who grew up watching anime on late night TV, playing JRPG video games, and spending time in nerdy online forums. Fairy-like synth pop elements meld with drum breaks, crafting a fantastical environment for singer Megan James to explore, her lyrics sounding like poems shared between two woodland nymphs exchanging love letters across a kingdom divided. It twinkles with an irony-free earnestness, inhabiting a world only Purity Ring could cook up.
29. ROCHELLE JORDAN
Through The Wall [Young Art]
Phasing through walls of the club to serve in every room on a constant basis.
—
A modern club epic, a night that could go on forever, and sometimes it feels like it does. Despite me ragging on its length, Through The Wall has finally managed to bring more eyeballs to Rochelle Jordan, one of the most overlooked, most iconic voices of electronic pop music of the last decade.
28. JAMES K
Friend [AD 93]
You actually forgot to return a dvd boxset of an anime series from blockbuster in 2001. You find it buried at the bottom of a box in your closet, but it’s mutated into a series you don’t recognize. It comforts you and invites you to put it in your VCR.
—
An appropriately hazy and blissful recreation of tried and true tropes of y2k pop and rock, with a healthy amount of 80s dream pop thrown in. Some solid moments throughout, including a certain cover that surprisingly pops up in the latter half of the penultimate track. Way to reference, James K!
27. SILVANA ESTRADA
Vendrán Suaves Lluvias [Glassnote]
Fleeting eye contact you make with a stranger as your curtain billows from gusts pushed by incoming storms.
—
Mexican singer/songwriter Silvana Estrada reckons with a breakup with an exorcism-like record, honoring but cutting out the parts of her life that were built around this person. It just so happens that when Estrada writes a song, she forms an orchestra around it, whether it be through traditional stringed accompaniment, or just a lush, chamber pop energy. Her songs are also be fueled by her coloratura-like voice, which could have powered ships centuries ago. All in all, Vendrán Suaves Lluvias is an emotional journey I recommend everyone check out before everyone you know is talking about her.
26. TITANIC
HAGEN [Unheard Of Hope]
The karaoke night at a nondescript business conference taking place in a hotel chain’s ballroom quickly turns into rallying cries for revolution as charismatic middle managers discover the fire within themselves to make changes that benefit the world.
—
Are rock’s saviors from Mexico City? Or are they rock opera’s saviors? Titanic are Mabe Fratti and Héctor Tosta, making music that’s theatrical and ambitious, with instrumental and timbre palettes extending far past many other records from this year, anchored by the cello of Fratti and guitar of Tosta, and flourished by wild synthesizer, percussion and more. There are so many moments on this record that feel triumphant, a bold declaration of a line in the sand, embracing elements of the avant-garde but still inhabiting a “rock” song. We need musicians pushing the envelope. Now more than ever.
25. DIJON
Baby [R&R Digital / Warner]
Staying up all night to watch the sunrise, worshipping its warming light in a delirious state.
—
Dijon celebrates fatherhood with a messy, emotional record that explodes with ideas and wild production, with shaggy tracks falling into the next, songs bleeding across the record and finding connections in the strangest of places. There are moments of quiet that suddenly rise into blown out missives, bleary grooves careening across the soundstage into some of the most soulful moments on record you’ll hear all year. At the end of the day though, it’s flooded with heart: there’s no way you can listen to this thing and say “ok but this guy doesn’t CARE about what he’s putting out” – it’s devoted in its passion, and many records from this year can’t claim that.
24. JOANNE ROBERTSON
Blurrr [AD 93]
Parting the covers on your bed to climb in and a dense cloud of fog billows out, revealing a chasm-like maze sinking into your mattress.
—
Spectral and haunting, UK singer/songwriter Joanne Robertson takes folk songs and throws them into a long corridor of fading dreams and forgotten memories. Songs fall and reach for a ledge to hold onto, but continue to careen into the darkness, echoing on forever. Most songs are purely Robertson’s voice and guitar, but composer Oliver Coates contributes cello and production work on a few tracks, adding some variation of the hazy, drifting compositions.
23. ERIKA DE CASIER
Lifetime [Independent Jeep]
Writing a lengthy missive on your LiveJournal page after being deceived by a potential lover once again.
—
On Lifetime, Danish R&B refresher Erika de Casier sounds her most dreamy, almost like she’s recalling either memories from her past or recanting dreams she had the night before. Her voice is slathered with reverb, making her sound softer than usual, as she navigates equally hazy, laid-back and ethereal instrumentals. Is it amnesia? Or is it really a dream? Are these feelings real, or an I under the influence of something? Either way, it’s fun to explore a clouded land with her after a few records of sharp, focused R&B tracks on Erika’s last few records.
22. PANDA BEAR
Sinister Grift [Domino]
A 1950s man preserved in a pit of quicksand is unearthed and immediately starts rumbling around town, singing songs from his heyday. As the day progresses he steadily degrades back into sand.
—
Panda Bear strips away some of the fog that’s filled his earlier releases in favor of more straightforward psych pop songwriting. It’s refreshing to hear his weirdo crooning and eschew sensibilities in this bright of light, making for a shaggy, 60s-pop obsessed basement dweller finally emerging into the sunlight and frolicking with butterflies in a pasture.
21. PURELINK
Faith [Pure Oil]
Tuning your domestic air purification systems to a certain frequency that makes your MPBC (micro-plastics blood content) vibrate inside your brain, leading to a glassy-eyed, euphoric trance.
—
Have not seen enough love for this album on year-end lists in 2025. Can an ambient dub trio be “hyped” in this day and age? The group brings soft, melancholy textures of early 00s Los Angeles “quiet revolution” computer music into the present, with tender, human-made touches like guest vocals (from Loraine James and Angelina Nonaj), and breathy layers of light synth, shifting in and out of focus. It’s a beautiful, misty record I’ve returned to again and again for moments of reprieve this year.
20. SAFE MIND
Cutting The Stone [Nude Club]
A computer program buddy that teaches you how to type as a kid wants to show you his band and they’re actually pretty sick coming out of your chunky desktop computer speakers.
—
Prolific singer/songwriter LUCY aka Cooper B. Handy and Augustus Muller of Boy Harsher link for a charmingly hammy set of synth pop slammers, buoyed by Muller’s rubbery synth work and powered forward by Handy’s magnetic personality and voice. It feels like music I loved in 2012 specifically: retro-facing but so fresh and so cool, like they were made solely to play the now-luxury apartments venue 285 Kent.
19. STEREOLAB
Instant Holograms on Metal Film [Warp]
A second golden disk launched into space around the same time as the last one, crash lands back down to Earth with instructions on how to achieve world peace and touched with celestial, alien energy.
—
Actual living legends Stereolab returned for their first album in 10+ years and who’d have thunk it: it’s fantastic, and one I think that will get better with age. Space-age instrumentals and Laetitia Sadier’s iconic voice keep the engine humming, making for a nice entry point for the band’s older, more legacy catalog for new fans, and a reason to go on a day-long Stereolab binge for longtime fans.
18. LAWRENCE HART
Come In Out Of The Rain / ASKING FOR A FRIEND [Double Six / Domino]
Fast-paced, warmly-saturated jump cuts track a pair of free-runners navigating through modern architecture, scenery and unceremoniously empty streets on a rain-soaked afternoon.
+
A DJ has converted his body into pure electricity and will select records, banging from your power sockets and making your lights pulsate in time.
—
The first of two spots on this list taken up by two records, but English producer Lawrence Hart put out two wonders this year. Both records (well, the latter is technically a “mixtape” but we’ll look past that) feel like they were culled from the late 2010s, with plenty of euphoria mixed in with the framework of modern UK garage. Lots of beats with heft, chopped up vocal samples (and on ASKING FOR A FRIEND, featured vocal guests), and excellent control of dynamics throughout. This guy is criminally overlooked in my mind, so please check these out if you’re a UK garage fan.
17. HORSEGIRL
Phonetics On and On [Matador]
A toymaker leaves their store for the night, leading to the little gear-and-spring powered toys to grind to life, chugging along the shelves in simple, on-beat stomps and claps.
—
Horsegirl’s 2022 debut was a knotty, wound-up piece of 90s and 00s college radio rock worship, one that saw the young band shine in their adoration. Their second album Phonetics On and On is almost like a paint-by-numbers version, a replica in an uncanny way. It’s more rigid than before, but the band sounds like theyre breathing easier within a palette they set for themselves going into recording. While listening, my brain went to commercial artists of the early 20th century, using intense skill and precision to churn out well-meaning advertisements of an idyllic life. Or maybe it’s more the populist work of Sol Lewitt, putting the building blocks in our hands, the instructions to reach this stoic life. Either way, they’re tightly wound, economic and utilitarian pop rock tracks that’ll get stuck in your head for the requisite amount of time, and will be a good hang for many years to come.
16. KOKOROKO
Tuff Times Never Last [Brownswood]
The absolute perfect summer evening, with a mellow bass heard from a rooftop party heard down the block.
—
The best summer album of 2025. The album is about feeling good all the time, feeling the rhythm, the groove. Kokoroko’s array of players link together for a soul-stirring bash of afropop, R&B, jazz and soul that felt like a lightening element throughout a hard year. Something to really take the edge off.
15. ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER
Tranquilizer [Warp]
Navigating dead webpages in a submersible fit for the internet, trawling various links and forums for any signs of remaining life.
—
Daniel Lopatin returns to the instrumental electronic landscapes that put his name on the map in the late 00s, a personal welcome change from the more vocal-lead compositions of the last few records. This record could be the soundtrack to a documentary about a version of the internet that doesn’t exist anymore: a pure, adventurous time that held as much wonder as it did danger. One could picture David Attenborough walking through listeners through defunct forums, barren MMORPG servers, and folk art-adjacent personal blogs, all while our current internet infrastructure, in its shiny diamond and chrome, becomes further infested by our corporate overlords.
14. LUCRECIA DALT
A Danger To Ourselves [RVNG Intl.]
Slow-dancing with your partner in an apartment that’s falling apart, dishes falling from crumbling shelves above you onto your heads, as the world dissolves outside the window.
—
Lucrecia Dalt has quietly built up a catalog unlike anyone else’s, first lurking in the depths of ambiguous, dreamy sound art, and lately morphing into a full-fledged alt pop star (at least in my circles). This record sees one of her most head-friendly collaborations with Japan’s David Sylvian, as she continues making mirage-like music that wavers in the desert heat and humidity. Songs that bubble underneath a microscope, that shift color when temperature changes, that blossom in the rain.
13. MEN I TRUST
Equus Asinus / Equus Caballus [Self-Released]
Standing out on the veranda of a small house in a European mountain town, sipping a coffee, while unbeknownst to you, opening credits of a film are overlaid on shots of you from afar, watching you stare out into the forests below.
—
Coming-of-age story where you have to rescue your high school crush from your evil half uncle. The nerd becomes the savior in an epic, dawn-lit chase scene.
—
The second double release of the year and I don’t have too much to say about it except for Men I Trust are vibe conquerors. The first record they put out, Equus Asinus, is more chill and laid-back, with 2025 standout “All My Candles” on it, a song that sounds like it’s made to reconsider your life’s choices to it, or sit by a fire and be a cozy little guy. It also features “Paul’s Theme,” which sounds like it was lifted from a film, I just can’t figure out which. Either way my wife hates this song for some reason. On the other hand, Equus Caballus is a more upbeat record, with updated versions of singles they’d put out between Untourable Album and this. It’s got great grooves, ones you swear you’d heard before, and is able to correct the vibe of a room almost immediately. The fact they’ve accumulated this incredible fanbase by putting out records on their own is still impressive to me. They’ve got this thing figured out, it seems.
12. HAYDEN PEDIGO
I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away [Mexican Summer]
Watching a minivan drive across the horizon line in the distance, dwarfed by a giant raincloud that engulfs the small vehicle, and ultimately passes through the storm and back into the sun.
—
Texan guitar wizard Hayden Pedigo brings an end to his trilogy of albums from the last three years. Wistful finger-picked guitar melodies that echo over the plains and into the simple homes of the people that maintain their lives out there. It’s an irony-free, wordless exploration of feeling, memory and space, sculpted through intricate and moving guitar pieces.
11. WALT MCCLEMENTS
On A Painted Ocean [Western Vinyl]
Zooming out from the fine dust and gravel of a dusty, western town, lit by neon signs, until the speckles of light shrink into nothingness amongst a black void.
—
Beautiful, turbulent accordion works… now wait, before you scroll down after reading the words accordion, let me tell you more. If you’re a reader of this blog, you might recognize Walt’s name from his collaborative album with Mary Lattimore from last year, a massive favorite. McClements makes the accordion sing like an organ on this album, with the sound of billowing air chambers coinciding with fraught electronics and other spectral noise. A wordless narration (aside from the spoken word bit about the application process of overdose-reversing drug Narcan) of our broken and hard times. It’s one of the more emotional records of the year, and one that snuck up on me big when putting this together.
10. CAROLINE
caroline 2 [Rough Trade]
A homemade mechanical vehicle built to climb steep inclines belches smoke and rattles its way to the summit of the local mountain, just so its creator can paint the sunrise each morning.
—
So glad that this band started getting more eyes after they put this record out. Caroline’s 2022 debut absolutely blew my socks off with its rattling earnestness, bringing back threads of early 00s ensemble indie rock, post rock and slices of classic emo for a record that sounded like no other. On caroline 2, they continue this trajectory of sounding like no one else, yet blatantly wearing their influences on their sleeve. Deeply emotional performances and songwriting coexist with steely, mechanical precision, slathered in autotune, and crackling at the seams beneath the sun.
9. REAL LIES
We Will Annihilate Our Enemies [Tonal]
Living in a city long enough to see your favorite local spots shutter, collectively lamented with your clan amongst bleary, intoxicated nights, and in labyrinthian group chats.
—
The meme “I am cringe, but I am free,” with a picture of a cow staring out at the ocean could potentially sum this album up, but not in the way you might think. This year, vulnerability in dance music is IN. It’s not about acting a fool and being cringe, but more confronting the ugly truths about the way you live your life, along with those in the others around you. Being true to yourself, and proud. Real Lies brings a deviously confident bravado to these dance tracks, orchestrating motion without an excess of volume or tempo, just an acceleration of mood and dynamics. It’s a record that acknowledges the stupid rule of law our interactions sometimes fall under, the second-guessing, finding love in the everyday, and translating that to something deeper. Throbbing club beats and steely spoken vocals light the way: a real celebration of life. Real Lies is also one of those groups that put out records where I say “I like this” at the time of release, but their records always grow past their impressions as time passes. Glad I was on this one big time from the start.
8. RAFAEL TORAL
Traveling Light [Drag City]
Ascending a somewhat slow escalator into heaven.
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I once rode up a very tall escalator listening to this album and nearly teared up. This is what we’re dealing with. I wrote it in my Warm Visions descriptor, but it really does feel like you’re ascending up into heaven, reflecting on your life’s ups and downs presented to you on an old-timey projector that the transitional angels wheel over to your spot in line. Long, arching tracks tell the story. Sweet bird song accent ascending and descending squeals of either feedback or harmonious organ sounds. It’s like the last gasps of air being released from a human’s body, becoming one with nature again. Toral really gets Megahertz with it, and for that I thank him.
7. KELLY MORAN
Don’t Trust Mirrors [Warp]
Journeying inside a palatial ice castle to find your beating heart inside.
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Hot off the tails of her 2024 album Moves In The Field, pianist Kelly Moran combines the inhuman precision of a disklavier and the metallic shine of her prepared piano on this wicked, light-refracting electronic and ambient record. Maybe not “ambient” per se – it’s an electronic piano record. Sound skates along brilliant surfaces, pirouetting with grace on a loop, then the sunshine light that bounces off the skate’s blades is now looping, and the loop gets longer, then contracts, then reopens to real time again. It’s a gorgeous record that felt so easy to listen to over and over this year when I needed a break away from vocals, and a ticket to somewhere unique.
6. GEESE
Getting Killed [Partisan]
Letting yourself have an unchecked manic episode as a treat and writing and releasing 100 messages in bottles, all found by a castaway that goes on to write the next great American novel based on your bottled ramblings.
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Don’t really need to say too much more about this record since it’s been on the lips of most people in the intersecting venn diagrams of indie music fandom. I’ll just say I’m really proud of this band. Their first few records saw them embracing the highest degree of rock maximalism, to mixed results. They exploded with ideas but were messy, clearly referencing their influences but not connecting the pieces. Getting Killed still feels like a hairy, wild record that falls in line with a lineage of great rock records, but the vision is much clearer, it stands alone much better and doesn’t need the references to prop it up anymore. This is a band that’s unafraid to try things out and it knows how to flex (or freak) a new muscle or two, separating itself from the pack. I’m grateful a band and a record like this hit the collective consciousness: it’s not an alt-country twang-gazer, or a motorik post punk snoozer, or a loud and proud protest rock record… it’s some good old American songwriters spinning weird folk tales of our bizzaro timeline.
5. GELLI HAHA
Funny Music [Innovative Leisure]
A hallucinogenic sugar rush causes you to break onto the set of a local access children’s show set play to play in its small ball pit set for 48 hours.
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This year I overheard an odd social interaction between two people at a concert. After witnessing one of the singers whistle a melody, one of concertgoers turned to their friend and said “I can’t remember the last time I whistled, that’s something I used to love doing as a kid.” Stupefied, I texted a friend this interaction and added “imagine abandoning your whimsy!” This offhand comment stuck with me through the rest of the year and has become a kind of personal mantra as the world thoroughly enshittifies itself. I gotta assume that’s where most elements in modern life start to go south, anyways: letting go of your sense of play, your imagination, a thoughtful part of your brain that lets you explore.
I say all this because if whimsy is what you’re looking for, Gelli Haha has the keys to kickstart your engine. Her debut album Funny Music feels beamed in from another planet (in this case, the Gelliverse), where play is prioritized. That’s not to say the album feels entirely alien: in many cases it feels like the weight of our gray world lays heavy on the jubliance of Haha’s, persevering and maintaining her spirit throughout. Candy-coated, technicolour instrumentals bounce off the walls and seep into the skin (these come with assitance from De Lux’s Sean Guerin, whose work has never sounded better) as Haha takes on shapes resembling Kate Bush, Grace Jones, Liz Fraser and her own signature cadence. To have a debut record come out this well-conceptualized, from the album design, to the songs themselves, to the live show, is pretty remarkable. And there’s a seat at the table waiting for you, too, if you don’t yet want to abandon your whimsy.
4. NINAJIRACHI
I Love My Computer [NLV]
All your accumulated old tech you’ve hoarded over the last two decades all connect together when you’re not home and have a rave, then secretly implant their DJ sets on your current audio player.
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Much like the Purity Ring record from this year, the debut LP from Australian producer Ninajirachi taps into a version of myself that was thriving in 2010 / 2011. Scrolling Reddit every day on my first macbook, watching artists like Madeon create bounding EDM mashups on his rainbow-lit MPC, searching for “artist+album+mediafire” in Google, feeling a sense of online freedom I had never felt before. She even references a song that I was obsessed with at the time (along with its animated video), “Easy” by MatZo and Porter Robinson. Since that fleeting moment of saturated nerd-dom, I’d shucked away that side of my taste, opting for snootier pastures. So why does this album hit so much for me? Likely because the songs are supercharged, buzzing, twinkling, pulsing pop songs that feel good to my dopamine-poisoned brain. The microplastics coursing through my cerebrum vibrate nicely to the dubstep drops of “Battery Death.” The sonic overload mashed into pop songs like “Fuck My Computer” and “All I Am” provides a space that’s LOUD to party in. It likewise feels like a record by someone who was raised in the era I described, accurately painting diptych portraits, one of a bygone realm and the other of a disintegrating barrier between the real and the online.
3. YHWH NAILGUN
45 Pounds [AD 93]
The sounds a body makes after being crushed by a 10 ton industrial weight, bones smeared into a dusty paste, once-flowing arteries wheezing, a remaining lifetime of air exhausted.
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2025 was pure chaos. Why not indulge in a little anarchy in the face of psychic damage? To me, the NYC quartet YHWH Nailgun’s (pronounced Yahweh) debut album felt the most apt record for our times this year. We’ve been subjected to punishing body horror unfolding in real time, masquerading as maintaining the status quo. Lead vocals that are choked out through a vicegrip, mutant stomps of electronics that disorient the listener, squeaks and squiggles of splintered guitar, and some of the most skillful, assaulting drumming performances you’ll hear all year. Similar in scene and in sound to the Lip Critic album from last year, YHWH Nailgun made a “pop” album that feels corroded throughout, screaming and thrashing against its chains in a fight for prolonged survival.
2. OKLOU
choke enough [True Panther]
The somewhat mystical, sleep-deprived qualities the early winter takes on as it starts getting darker sooner, with your everyday routines suddenly plunged in darkness and twinkling lights.
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What does it say about our current times that not only are we romanticizing simpler times in an ouroboros-like fashion, the head of the snake coiling in tighter and tighter to the more recent past (in the case of Oklou’s choke enough, roughly the late 90s / early 00s), but also adapting our current lifestyles onto our prospective past selves? Many people have clocked the Serial Experiments Lain-like palette choices on this album, imagining themselves on their family computer in 2000, doomscrolling for hours with chunky hardware surrounding them casting warm, blinking lights in the pitch black early morning darkness. A liminal time if you will. But if we were to actually go back to this time, wouldn’t we want to revel in ditching our tether to the online world? Breaking free of the ball and chain that’s stored in our pockets at all times? Or perhaps it’s two roads of alternate timelines: one of which being smart phones never existed and we’re all still using Razr phones in 2039, texting friends in T9 and programming your favorite hyperpop ringtones each month, the internet having hit a wall of development at the turn of the millennium (or let’s cap it at 2004). The other timeline is wishcasting getting in on the internet-monopolized monoculture early on, worming capillaries of your personality and consciousness into the groundwork of forums, social media and antiquated VR technology fully assimilating into “the wired” and being a shut-in, online-only presence. When there’s no point in aestheticizing the present, it’s only right to start reprogramming the past.
Anyways this record is fantastic. Tapping into sonic textures similar to trance pop cuts from its mainstream heyday ie Alice Deejay or even Cher’s “Believe,” with featherlight, nocturnal wings of instrumentals casting imprints in the snow as it silently snatches its unwitting prey in the darkness. It feels online in both of the ways I laid out above: ultra-connected and pleasantly oblivious. Oklou acts as a Charon on the digital river Styx, paddling through elements of drain (hello Bladee) and hyperpop (hello underscores) and production sounding generally futuristic. Zooming in a bit closer though, you might notice some of the melodies and phrasing comes off baroque or even twee, with agile passages flitting by and at such frequencies they could have passed as built-in ringtones in the 00s. Not to mention the trumpet, strings, acoustic guitar and other various live instrumentation that brings this record out of the basement and into the concert hall. At the end of the day though it boils down to familiarity and the comfort it brings. choke enough could be a friend you hadn’t seen on AIM for a while, a chintzy jingle from your childhood, the sound of a distant rave in an abandoned office park, memories of a fountain at your childhood mall, of acid flashbacks from a night out. It’s deeply adaptable and ready to accommodate any fantasy you wish to live or relive.
1. LOS THUTHANAKA
Los Thuthanaka [Self-Released]
The sonic crumbling, combustion and implosion of this world as we know it, and the rebirth of the new world, one that shines bright. The first sunbeam in a rain cloud-filled sky.
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I don’t think I’ll be able to sum up this record better than Jeremy Larson and his blurb for Pitchfork’s #1 ranking, in that it’s “five generations of music and culture all co-existing and dancing with one another.” But I’ll try and extrapolate with my own thoughts as well.
Siblings Chuquimamani-Condori, formerly known as Elysia Crampton, E+E, DJ E and DJ Ocelote, and their brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton formed Los Thuthanaka after separately putting out some of the most revolutionary music of the last decade. Chuquimamani-Condori being one of the more consistent creative voices of the last decade-plus, quilting hyper tapestries of blown out noise, various strains of Andean folk music, Hispanic radio broadcasts (and DJ tags) into invigorating and blissful compositions that especially caught my attention with 2023’s DJ E, my second-favorite record of the 2020s so far. Meanwhile Joshua Chuquimia Crampton hasn’t slouched either, putting out geometric, trance-like guitar records, likewise referencing the siblings’ Andean heritage in its modes and melodies, as well as blowing out speakers in the process.
Their individual sounds coalesce on Los Thuthanaka, with C-C’s dizzying array of chaotic electronics and samples act as the tassels, bells and glitter surrounding Joshua’s repeating guitar passages. The songs hypnotically unfurl, creating a world of their own where volume is law, each individual voice maxed out and blasting at you (as far as I’m aware, like DJ E, Los Thuthanaka is unmixed / unmastered). Ersatz, chunky chords and loping melodies extend on forever, courtesy of Joseph’s slick guitar passages and as C-C’s trademark DJ tags rip into the fray, delighting in its sensorial overload. It delivers upon my belief that noise music is blissful. Achieving a level of transcendence in the din that isn’t possible elsewhere. Ripples of harmony skate across rocky waters. It’s beautiful.
On a personal note, I experienced a family tragedy this summer that required a lot of driving from place to place. In the face of this torrential grief, for some reason I went to Los Thuthanaka on a lot of the early drives. The cyclical, mantra-like delivery felt like a controlled excavation of my feelings, with angelic sheets of noise like on “Parrandita “Sariri Tunupa”” or cathartic demolition of crushing, blown out cymbals and guitar on “Caporal ‘Apnaqkaya Titi'” or the cyberpunk groove of “Huayño ‘Phuju.'” It all comes together for an experience that doesn’t sound like anything else, without exaggeration. Ideally this will spawn inspiration from other indigenous musicians to tell their stories as well, especially if they sound this progressive.
Thanks for reading!
Warm Visions 